> Because, today, "real" now means it has social sharing, interactivity, and a certain level of visual polish your web page will lack.
Apparently a real website has social sharing and "interactivity" that can't be achieved with raw code! I'm guessing you're not a developer.
> * A WordPress install is a better path because it looks nice.*
That's the saddest statement I've read all week, only topped by..
"Growing wheat?"
Nobody suggested "notepad". A basic HTML structure can be achieved in 5 minutes in your code editor. From there it's about populating that structure with layout components. Yet more minutes coming your way. What, you wanted to have your site made by clicking a few buttons?
"Tweaking the template" in Wordpress is an exercise in extreme patience. A lot of faith in the black box under the Wordpress hood, and a spammy, over-commercialized "do you want fries with that" plugin ecosystem. The fragmented style of adding custom CSS or HTML in wordpress... you end up with a bloated unsustainable, messy maintenance headache. That's how you want people to learn web dev?
> Frankly, raw HTML and CSS is already a dying path
Rubbish. When it comes to doing interesting polished "modern" things with transitions, nested flexbox layouts, interactivity, and custom light-weight modules, there's no better way to control the quality and details of a web product than with raw coding.
The thing is, if you've never written a line of code in your life, you don't have an editor set up. You don't know what an editor or an IDE is. By "entry points", the post is talking about what is the shortest, easiest path to get someone from "has never done anything resembling programming" to "feels good about their experience creating a software thing".
> A basic HTML structure can be achieved in 5 minutes in your code editor.
I'm currently authoring my second book on the web [1]. Each bit of HTML and CSS was lovingly hand-crafted from scratch. I know exactly how quickly you can slap a web page together. I also know how shitty it looks before you spend hours and hours tweaking the CSS, and that's assuming you already know CSS.
A bare bones HTML page still looks like a physics website from the 90s. No person who is taking their first steps in computing is going to look at that and think, "Programming is awesome! I want to do more of this!"
> When it comes to doing interesting polished "modern" things with transitions, nested flexbox layouts, interactivity, and custom light-weight modules, there's no better way to control the quality and details of a web product than with raw coding.
Quality and polish aren't relevant to this discussion. The article is not "what's the best way for a professional to make web sites?" It's "how do people get into making software as easily as possible?"
> A bare bones HTML page still looks like a physics website from the 90s.
No it doesn't. "Bare bones" is a benchmark that has shifted due to easy CSS that can be applied to elements. Beginners are using CSS to make their first pages look nice, from drop shadows to rounded corners. I think you may be out of touch.
> No person who is taking their first steps in computing is going to look at that and think...
If we want to understand what beginners and students are thinking, we should avoid consulting senior software engineers for insight.
> how do people get into making software as easily as possible
Yes, and it's not by giving them a baked cake and the task of icing it. All under the watchful gaze of Uncle Google or Aunty Wordpress.
We're talking about industry entry points, not child learning activities. It's better to reach the point of nice looking page without sign-up to Wordpress-World or "install this collection of mysterious files". The idea with learning is to allow students to get as far as possible ON THEIR OWN, until they naturally or logically hit a wall that requires help from broader tools and services.
Ill suggest notepad. Ill slap together some basic html doctype a head with style and script tags, yes inline, a body with some simple divs and in no time at all it will look as good if not better than the hipster 50 000 line Frankensteins monster of bloat.
In the 80's we knew that a single small optimalization was worthless but if you acumulate enouh of them the sum of the parts blew the mind of even the most sophisticated software wizards. The trend nowadays is to hoard deoptimalizations while arguing it doesnt mater.
I keep wondering why popular modules so rarely make it into the language. I joked the other day that it would be nice to have sortable <table>'s out of the box. Imagine the table code was <table json="{}"/> and that we could do <form json="{}"/> too. The amount of code we could discard. lol
>and in no time at all it will look as good if not better //
Back in the day, you then tested it on IE and did the other 50% of the work.
Then you basically created a framework to ease that, and include fixes for it browsers too, and then you realised you were making a framework and that it was more optimal to use an established framework that 50,000 man hours had already been spent on ...
Before you know it you're theming WordPress on a shared hosting server, rather than ./configure-ing httpd and writing everything in nano.
This is what React actually lets you do... It just also acknowledges that UI components must be sufficiently typed and coded that they can accept lambdas as properties in order to provide the expressivity needed. Template languages must be real languages because templates are macros at heart.
I expect Web Components will learn that lesson slowly and painfully instead, as they cling to the broken ideas that got us here.
Apparently a real website has social sharing and "interactivity" that can't be achieved with raw code! I'm guessing you're not a developer.
> * A WordPress install is a better path because it looks nice.*
That's the saddest statement I've read all week, only topped by..
"Growing wheat?"
Nobody suggested "notepad". A basic HTML structure can be achieved in 5 minutes in your code editor. From there it's about populating that structure with layout components. Yet more minutes coming your way. What, you wanted to have your site made by clicking a few buttons?
"Tweaking the template" in Wordpress is an exercise in extreme patience. A lot of faith in the black box under the Wordpress hood, and a spammy, over-commercialized "do you want fries with that" plugin ecosystem. The fragmented style of adding custom CSS or HTML in wordpress... you end up with a bloated unsustainable, messy maintenance headache. That's how you want people to learn web dev?
> Frankly, raw HTML and CSS is already a dying path
Rubbish. When it comes to doing interesting polished "modern" things with transitions, nested flexbox layouts, interactivity, and custom light-weight modules, there's no better way to control the quality and details of a web product than with raw coding.